Farthest Frontier food spoilage guide

Food in Farthest Frontier does not keep. Every item has a lifetime in months, and when it runs out, whatever is left in storage vanishes. How long that is depends on three things you control: the difficulty you picked, the building the food sits in, and whether you turned it into something that keeps. This guide puts numbers on all three, using the community wiki's Resources and Spoilage articles (the Spoilage article is marked as updated for 1.1.0).

How long each food lasts

The wiki lists base lifetimes for Vanquisher. The Spoilage article says lifetime is multiplied by 1.25 on Trailblazer and by 2.5 on Pioneer, so the same bread that lasts 6 months on Vanquisher lasts 15 on Pioneer.

Food	Vanquisher (months)	Trailblazer	Pioneer
Meat	3	3.75	7.5
Fish	3	3.75	7.5
Milk	3	3.75	7.5
Berries	4	5	10
Bread	6	7.5	15
Greens	6	7.5	15
Fruit, mushrooms, eggs	6	7.5	15
Beans	12	15	30
Root vegetables	12	15	30
Pastry	12	15	30
Nuts	18	22.5	45
Grain	24	30	60
Smoked meat, smoked fish	24	30	60
Cheese	36	45	90
Preserves, preserved vegetables	60	75	150

One inconsistency to know about: the wiki's Farming article says greens last 4 months on Vanquisher, while its Resources table says 6. Either way, greens are the crop most likely to rot. The resources list has the lifetime of every item, including flour (18 months) and non-food materials like firewood (96) and tallow (120).

Storage buildings and barrels

Food in a storage building lasts longer than its base lifetime by that building's multiplier. These are the wiki's 1.1.0 figures:

Building	Lifetime multiplier	Max barrels
Granary	x2	5
Market Square	x2	10
Brick Root Cellar	x2	10
Market	x1.5	10
Root Cellar	x1.5	10
Warehouse	x1.5	5
Storehouse	x1.25	5
Vault	x1.25	5
Storage Cart	x1.25	0

Each barrel a storage building uses adds 4% lifetime, or 5% with the Wax-Sealed Barrels technology, and the bonuses multiply. Only barrels the building is using count, not ones just stocked there. A barrel keeps working at full strength until it wears out after 123 months. The relic Ice of Amatok cuts the spoilage rate by 25% (about +33% lifetime) on top of all this, and goods kept in the Trading Post do not spoil at all, up to 500 of each tradeable resource.

The official game guide words barrels differently: each barrel gives "a 5% reduction to spoilage", with up to 5 in storehouses and markets and 10 in root cellars, for up to 50% in a full root cellar. The wiki's 1.1.0 table gives markets 10 barrels and treats the bonus as a lifetime multiplier. We use the wiki numbers below because they are more recent and more specific.

Worked examples

• Greens in a full Brick Root Cellar (Vanquisher). 6 months x 2 x 1.04¹⁰ (10 barrels) = 6 x 2 x 1.48 = 17.8 months. With Wax-Sealed Barrels: 6 x 2 x 1.05¹⁰ = 19.5 months.
• Bread in a Storehouse with 5 barrels. 6 x 1.25 x 1.04⁵ = 6 x 1.25 x 1.22 = 9.1 months.
• Grain in a Granary with 5 barrels. 24 x 2 x 1.22 = 58 months. Grain is the food to stockpile; bake it as you need it.
• Meat in a plain Root Cellar, no barrels, Pioneer. 3 x 2.5 x 1.5 = 11.3 months. On Vanquisher the same meat lasts 4.5, which is why hunters need a Smokehouse.

Turn short-lived food into long-lived food

Processing beats storage for the worst offenders. A Smokehouse turns 15 meat or fish and 1 firewood into 15 smoked meat or fish: 3 months becomes 24, eight times longer, with no loss in quantity. A Cheesemaker turns 10 milk into 10 cheese: 3 months becomes 36. A Preservist turns 8 fruit or 8 root vegetables, 1 glassware and 1 firewood into 8 jars that keep 60 months.

The Smokehouse is the cheapest fix: tier 1, 25 work, 15 logs and 8 stone, one worker. The Cheesemaker and Preservist both need Town Center tier 3 and bricks. Greens cannot be processed into anything, which is why the wiki suggests skipping cabbage and leeks or growing only a small baseline of them.

A plan by stage

• First years: a Root Cellar (tier 1, needs a Stockyard) for food, a Smokehouse next to the hunters, and beans or peas, which keep 12 months.
• Tier 2: a Granary for grain and flour, a Market (x1.5, 10 barrels) near houses, and bread baked from stored grain rather than stockpiled bread.
• Tier 3: upgrade to a Brick Root Cellar (35 bricks, 250 gold), build a Cooper and fill the cellars with barrels, then add a Cheesemaker if you run a barn and a Preservist for root vegetables and fruit.